“Milk,” the film about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, that opened Wednesday, is the latest effort from director Gus Van Sant. The action in the film takes place thirty-one years ago, when San Franciscans elected Harvey Milk, an openly gay politician, to their Board of Supervisors to fight for the rights of his disenfranchised constituents. But just a year after his historic election, a fellow supervisor named Dan White shot and killed Milk. White was bitterly resentful of Milk's growing influence and power in the city, so he decided to put an end to it. He also killed the city's beloved mayor, George Moscone, in a deadly rampage inside the offices of City Hall.

Milk has been the subject of several books and the Academy Award-winning documentary feature, “The Times of Harvey Milk” by Rob Epstein (1984); but “Milk” (2008) is the first fictional feature to explore private aspects of the man's personal life and career. With Sean Penn starring as Harvey Milk, James Franco, Josh Brolin as Dan White, the assassin of gay activist Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and Emile Hirsch, “Milk” is accessible and instructive, an astute chronicle of big-city politics and the portrait of a warrior whose passion was equaled by his generosity and good humor. Mr. Penn, an actor of unmatched emotional intensity and physical discipline, outdoes himself here, playing a character different from any he has portrayed before.
His acting range definitely reached new limits that will burst him straight in to the Oscar competition. Hopefully!

"He came in kind of ready made" for the role, director Gus Van Sant told Reuters about winner of the best actor Academy Award for playing a hard-nosed cop in 2003's "Mystic River."

Like Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” (suggested by the Columbine High shootings) and “Last Days” (by the suicide of Kurt Cobain), “Milk” is the chronicle of a death foretold. Before that subway station encounter, we have already seen real-life news video of the aftermath of Milk’s assassination, as well as grainy photographs of gay men being rounded up by the police. But these images don’t spoil anything whatsoever.

While watching "Milk" during the current U.S. political battles over gay marriage, audiences can't help but ponder progress on gay rights because in looking at Harvey Milk, writer Dustin Lance Black has chosen as a backdrop the politician's battle against California's Proposition 6, which would have banned gay teachers in public schools in 1978. For those in California having to vote for Proposition 8 nowadays, it would have been easier to decide just by watching Anita Bryant ranting about the evils of homosexuality, had the movie been released two weeks ago.

The social message of the film is very powerful. It is like a punch regarding the gay situation in our society as well as regarding our preconceptions that we may not even be aware of. Although politics shape the narrative, “Milk” doesn’t play like a standard biopic, in part because of Milk’s flamboyant demeanor, but also because of what seems to be Van Sant’s true passion: the band of outsiders and the bonds among those on the margins who choose to make their own lives and have their own families.